Climate Illustrated is a communication and art project on Instagram  run by Marte Skaara (Norway) and Michaela (USA).

When they once met at the UN Climate Secretariat, they decided to help changing the “image” of climate change from a distant problem to a crisis that affects everyone everywhere in daily life. So they started to collect stories written by people from all over the world that tell their experiences with climate change. Afterwards a bundle of illustrators was asked to illustrate them.

After already having illustrated the story written by Melissa Schäfer in August this year, I was very happy to be asked to do another one. This second story was written by the Norwegian biologist Trude Myhre who is forest conservation senior advisor at WWF-Norway is very active in protecting Norway’s primeval forests. In her story she writes about her childhood and how she felt deeply connected with nature when playing in the forest. She says: “Old growth forests are unique and undisturbed ecosystems, where every organism, every interaction is a book of its own. When an old growth forest is cut down, all of this is destroyed. Like knocking down a library just to sell the walls.”

I picked up this image of a forest being a library where stories of hundreds of years are stored. So it’s like a hole in the library wall where you can have a look inside the forest. And there’s sitting Trude as a child and reading a book – probably a very, very old one.

My illustration was published beside three other in issue 4 of the Australian Sowing Seeds magazine.